Pratiquer

"What happens now?"

"Now?" The Doctor looms over him with a mad gleam in his eyes. He chuckles, a light laughter tinged with mania. His brows furrow as he stares intently over the thick rims of his spectacles. "Let's go practise medicine".

Practice has a curious double-meaning in English. We say it for something we are doing for real, as in "put into practice". But we also use it as in "practise violin" meaning without an audience, and preferably in a room with thick walls. This contradictory shift is fairly straightforward; it started with doing, then it became learning by doing, and finally just became learning, whether or not it involves putting your skill into actual use.

French doesn't have this issue, their equivalent only applies in the "putting into practice" sense. You can't pratique by staying in your room, you pratique by going out and doing it. The other things are called training or exercise. We have those words too, but unfortunately in English they also got somehow mixed in to our word for putting a skill into practice.

Far from being an etymological problem, this reflects a fundamental issue about practice. The slide of practice away from being practical is actually a slight-of-hand, a kind of goal substitution. Instead of learning the actual skill, you learn the training skill instead. If those are very similar, great, but the further away from the real thing you are, the less useful your practice is. In other words, it all hinges on whether your practice has intention.

Training is a way of dealing with our limitations as far as optimising lots of things at once. Having to hit the ball and get the footwork right and follow your opponent and think strategically about your shots is a lot to do at once. We can feed the optimiser by giving it simpler forms of the problem. But the crucial thing about training is that it's meant to be an approximation to true practice, as close to practical as possible given the constraints. Too often it takes on a life of its own and ends up in pointless drills that teach you nothing.

Education gets this wrong a lot. It's well-reported that the best way to study for a test is to practise taking the test in test-like conditions. Yet the structure used for teaching usually revolves around practice problems or textbook study completely detached from the ultimate test conditions. Equally, you could ask, why the test at all? The actual situations in which you need to use skills or knowledge bear nearly no resemblance to test conditions. It's completely non-practical.

Ultimately, it's just a question of doing things the right way round. If you start with the idea of "I want to learn", it's easy to learn a bunch of useless nonsense, memorise random facts with no practical value, or end up worrying about macronutrient balance when really you just need to lift more. On the other hand, if you start with "I want to do", you quickly realise you're not good enough to do that yet, and you go about fixing the biggest obstacles to getting there.